Group Polarization Quotes

… when you assemble a number of men to have the advantage of their joint wisdom, you inevitably assemble with those men, all their prejudices, their passions, their errors of opinion, their local interests, and their selfish views. From such an Assembly can a perfect production be expected?

Organizational structures that allow divisions and departments to own their turf and people with long tenure to take root creates the same hardened group distinctions as Congressional redistricting to produce homogeneous voting blocs - all of which makes it easier to resist compromise, let alone collaboration.

As you get larger, it is harder to have focused discussions. Because one of the things I've learned about Congress over the past four years that I've been in is there's no shortage of opinions about how things should be done on any particular subject.

When everybody in a group is susceptible to similar biases, groups are inferior to individuals, because groups tend to be more extreme than individuals.

The minute somebody joins a committee... they immediately suffer from committee brain. They become wildly over-enthusiastic, over-optimistic, over-pessimistic. Committees turn people into idiots, and politics is a committee.

When everyone thinks alike, no one is thinking clearly.

Partisanship shapes the reality that people choose to see.

We're segregating ourselves because we're afraid we're going to offend each other.

People nowadays talk about issues as if they're reading lines off a teleprompter. They recite what they read and echo it without thinking. It has become easier to divide people than to unify them, and to blind them than to give them vision. We are no longer unified like a bowl of Cheerios. Instead, we have become as segregated as a box of Lucky Charms. Every day we see the same leprechauns on TV acting like they're the experts of everything.

When like-minded people, talking mostly with one another, end up thinking a more extreme version of what they thought before they started to talk... If you put a bunch of rebels in a room and ask them to discuss rebellion, they'll get more extreme.

When like-minded people deliberate as an organized group, the general opinion shifts towards extreme versions of their common beliefs.

In any fairly large and talkative community such as a university there is always the danger that those who think alike should gravitate together where they will henceforth encounter opposition only in the emasculated form of rumour that the outsiders say thus and thus. The absent are easily refuted, complacent dogmatism thrives, and differences of opinion are embittered by the group hostility. Each group hears not the best, but the worst, that the other group can say.

No president is well-served by groupthink or by everybody singing from the same sheet of music they think he's on.

No sophism is too gross to delude minds distempered by party spirit.

I can think of nothing worse than a think-tank where everybody agreed.

Dividing into teams doesn't necessarily mean denigrating others. Studies of groupishness have generally found that groups increase in-group love far more than they increase out-group hostility.

Ideological amplification happens when like minded people deliberate…they push each other to extreme points of views….The argument pool in a group of liberals will be only liberal. Likewise with conservatives, the other way…. Most of us on most issues do not have a ton of information…we might be steered away from moderation…. Political correctness is a good example of ideological amplification.

I think better of our behaviour as individuals than I do when we see ourselves as members of a group. It's when people start forming groups that we have to watch our backs.

Group action -- yes; group thinking -- no.

My point is not that religion itself is the motivation for wars, murders and terrorist attacks, but that religion is the principal label, and the most dangerous one, by which a "they" as opposed to a "we" can be identified at all.

Patrick Moynihan famously said that everyone is entitled to his own opinion but not to his own facts. Liberals want to turn that on its head and claim that their opinions are facts and anyone who disagrees isn’t merely voicing a bad opinion but it somehow living in alternative reality or “denying” science. It’s the secular version of claiming that God is on your side.

Groups tend to be more extreme than individuals.

This is in us: a certain sense of denial, a certain sense of groupthink. This is not something that sits on one party line or the other. We've seen it in all permutations throughout history, and at the core of it is a certain insistence that what we want to be true is now true, and what we don't like is now false.

It's about polarization. You're trying to stir up something in your audience.

It's much easier to gain control over a mass population when you pit them against each other.